Opal Lee is a writer.
Restaurant chains have told their investors that a minimum wage hike wouldn’t be a big deal — even as their corporate lobbying groups in Washington fight plans for a $15 minimum wage.
Former vice president of Bolivia Álvaro García Linera sat down with Jacobin to discuss socialist strategy, how the Left can mobilize against antidemocratic forces like the right-wingers who recently executed a coup in Bolivia, and why democratic socialism means an “overflowing of democracy.”
After years of dashed attempts, Spain’s left-wing government has legalized euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Its victory shows how socialists in the United States can win the right for a dignified death for all.
In order to challenge the ALP leadership’s right-wing policy agenda, we first need to democratize the party’s rotten internal structures. The party’s Left faction should be leading this fight; instead, they’re helping perpetuate a system that keeps left-wing politics locked out.
Coal mining is coming to an end in Nova Scotia. But the industry’s long history of lethal accidents, labor unrest, and prolonged decline offers a lesson for the future. A green energy transition will need public investment and control, not piecemeal subsidies for private capital.
United Teachers of Los Angeles won a strong health and safety agreement ahead of returning to classrooms later this month. They won it the old-fashioned way: organizing rank-and-file teachers to demand an agreement that benefits teachers, parents, and students.
Despite unionization rates more than twice that of the United States, many Israeli workers continue to be committed to apartheid and the racist ideology enabling it. The Zionist project is preventing Israeli workers from organizing alongside Palestinians.
Throughout his adult life, Martin Luther King Jr believed in striking down not only racial apartheid but class exploitation. That twin commitment was embodied in his final effort: the often-forgotten Poor People’s Campaign.
Labour Party leader Keir Starmer has been an incompetent opposition to Boris Johnson. But he has fulfilled his immediate objective during his first year in charge: waging war on the Labour left, attacking Jeremy Corbyn’s legacy, and pushing his party to the right.
Agricultural bosses and their allies are accusing Australians of being work-shy as they face a post-pandemic labor shortage. But it’s low wages and abusive working conditions that make it hard for them to find workers. The solution is obvious: decent pay for decent work.
At the very heart of our capitalist economic system is something grotesque: labor exploitation. That’s immoral — and we need some form of workplace democracy to undo it.
Latin America is not the United States’ “backyard.” It’s the training ground, historian Greg Grandin argues, for periods of imperial retrenchment and regroupment. But it’s also a region where radical movements have consistently refused to be crushed by US imperial power.
Much more than just the wit and satirist of his posthumous reputation, Oscar Wilde was a radical thinker who posed a fundamental challenge to the conservative mores of late Victorian England. His thinking on liberation led him to imagine a socialist future in which creativity can flourish across all of society.
Since the end of the dictatorship, Greece’s police have remained a deeply authoritarian institution with a strong fascist presence. Yet the breakup of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn hasn’t changed much — and the right-wing government’s creation of new special units is encouraging police to crack down on their political enemies.
Recent decades have seen a historic shift in Danish politics, with mass-membership parties replaced by a professionalized media-political sphere. To drive real social change, the socialist left needs to go beyond creating a progressive niche — and rebuild the mass organizations that once made the working class a mighty political force.
Whatever the size and shape of Joe Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill, you can be sure to hear corporate weeping and gnashing of teeth about how they can’t afford a tax hike. The truth: they’ve got the money — they just don’t want to share.
The pandemic has been taking the existing injustices of capitalism and exaggerating them to the point of cartoonishness. A case in point is a recent study that finds Wall Street bonuses have grown by more than 1,200% since the 1980s — while the federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in over a decade.
All eyes are on Alabama as we await the results of the Amazon union election. The election is a historic one, but it shouldn’t be: workers shouldn’t have to work this hard to exercise their basic rights to unionize, and bosses at companies like Amazon should have zero say about whether they unionize or not.
Virginia recently became the first Southern state to abolish the death penalty. That’s a good step — we should end the barbaric punishment everywhere else too.
Rahm Emanuel recently argued that states should be able to opt out of a $15 minimum wage. He’s being rewarded for it with a keynote speaking slot at an event organized by the National Restaurant Association, one of the key opponents of a minimum wage hike. Why won’t Rahm go away?